Michael Burstein, president of the Society for the Preservation of Pluto as a Planet, reports on his confrontation at the Newton Free Library with Neil deGrasse Tyson, the director of New York's Hayden Planetarium and the guy who basically got the ball rolling for reclassifying their beloved sphere as a "dwarf planet."

Well, OK, maybe "confrontation" is a bit harsh, but Tyson did try to ward them off with the sign of the cross (Ed. lame-o question: Would that work on Jewish vampires?).

Margalit reports how the Panera Bread where her daughter works requires workers to come in even if they are sick with an airborne, communicable virus, if they can't find somebody to cover their shifts.

Jessica Lipnack decides she wants a sandwich board to use while walking in crosswalks to tell Massholes to get off their damn phones and pay more attention to the intersection. She says she got the idea after an encounter with a phone-using Masshole in an SUV in a Newtonville crosswalk.

Margalit reports NPR is sending a crew over to her kitchen tonight to watch her make a big pot of chicken soup and some biscuits for dinner:

... They're doing a story about people who have changed their shopping and cooking habits since the recession really took hold. That would be me. I'm so much more careful about what I buy, and we hardly have any packaged foods at all in the house anymore. We've been using up what we can from our pantry, but looking forward I can't see us buying too much in the way of anything packaged besides cereal. Because my son lives on cereal as a snack, and the food pantry we use tends to bring us 4 boxes a month. ...

Lorianne DiSabato took in the BC/UMass match on Friday (Eagles won, 2-1) and spotted some young fans.

Used under this Creative Commons license. See your photo here: Post it in the Universal Hub group on Flickr.

The problem with putting photos of yourself with prominent politicians on your campaign Web site is that somebody might notice when you start taking them down because those politicians are no longer the sort of people you'd want to be associated with.

Whatever it was, I feel sorry for everybody who was stuck in the traffic nightmare there. Not only was the right lane on 128 southbound jammed up with all these people not moving at all, people trying to get to Highland from the feeder road off the side of 128 also weren't going anywhere anytime soon.

Rob Colonna watched Newton firefighters put out a fire this evening at 301 Lake St.

Stephen Walsh took photos as well.

Photo used under Creative Commons.

Jessica Lipnack accepts the blame for making the Taste Coffee House so crowded - after all, she blogged about it.

... Then a man, sitting at a table by himself, offers me the chair across from him. I explain that there are two more coming. At which point, Nik repeats his view of me as the cause of the standing-room-only. And explains that I've blogged about Taste. At which point the man pipes up: "Here's a quote for your blog: 'Taste is the best thing to happen to Newtonville in five years.'" ...

The Globe reports a former employee of the Boston branch of Shreve, Crump and Low was arrested on charges she replaced two diamonds headed to the Chestnut Hill branch with cubic-zirconia replicas.

The Chestnut Hill store noticed the swap in September.

The Suffolk County District Attorney's office reports Tanya Nichols will be arraigned on Feb. 9. She was allowed to walk out of court after a Boston Municipal Court judge denied a request from prosecutors to revoke her bail in an unrelated Lynn case.

Innocent, etc.